This past week two radio show hosts posted a screen shot from a Facebook page on which the poster shared a photograph she had taken of a severely damaged automobile and a stretcher lying near it. It was accompanied by her comment complaining about the delay the volunteer fire department members were causing in directing traffic, referring to one firefighter in the picture with a vulgarity. After the public began expressing its outrage about the posting it was deleted but not before the poster commented “Apparently, I was insensitive. Oops. Am I supposed to care? “
We have a presumptive presidential nominee of one party who regularly insults women, ethnic and religious groups, rival candidates and anyone else who challenges or angers him on Twitter with no apparent repercussions. Indeed, his supporters appear to relish his vitriol.
Three decades ago, when I was practicing law, New York experimented with allowing cameras in the courtroom to permit filming of trials and other court proceedings. I was an advocate of this because I thought it would allow the public to view the trials firsthand and not rely on a reporter’s viewpoint or have to speculate about what was occurring.
When I became a judge, the experiment was over and it fell to each of us on the bench to decide whether and to what extent cameras would be allowed. I permitted two trial to be filmed in their entirety with the consent of the lawyers on each side. I also allowed sentencings to be filmed over the objections of the lawyers because I felt that we were at a stage where no prejudice to the defendant could occur and the public had an interest in seeing the final outcome in the cases.
That changed a few years before I retired.
News coverage went increasingly from print to digital and readers were allowed to post comments anonymously about the defendants and the proceedings.
I soon discovered that if the defendant was African-American there would appear to be a virtual Ku Klux Klan meeting in the comment section of the news article. If the defendant was an unattractive woman, there would be sexist and misogynist postings. Often the prison sentence would discussed in hateful and homophobic terms. The vile and the vitriol soon outweighed any meaningful discussion that the news article might have inspired. Since there was no way in which the anonymous comments could be policed until after they were posted, I prohibited filming in the courtroom at all proceedings.
The Buffalo News, faced with this problem, changed its policy concerning comments on their website. It required the poster to provide their name and town along with the comment. The racist, sexist, misogynist, homophobic postings disappeared and traffic on the website quickly returned to normal.
I suppose the lesson here is that anonymous haters wear a virtual sheet but when the anonymity is stripped away they slink away perhaps crawling back under the rock.
Obviously, it is almost impossible to set standards for decorum on Facebook and other social media platforms. As a parent, we are constantly warning our children about the content of photos and comments they post on their pages, especially when they are entering the workforce and prospective employers are scrutinizing social media in the same way they do references. In the digital age, what is posted online lives forever.
Regrettably media outlets that market their sites for advertising by counting the number of visitors who click on the site find this consideration to be a secondary one.
We seem to be loosening and coarsening our standards about what is permissible commentary and conduct. It appears to be the new normal.
It’s not good.